Speaking of Family Values

by Sandra Feroe

    It seems as if someone's always pontificating about "family values" these days. No matter how often it's invoked, its meaning never seems quite clear. One of Webster's definitions of family is "the basic unit in society, having as its' nucleus two or more people living together and raising children," but we all know that the pious finger-wagging engaged in by religious extremists extends to all models except the "Leave It To Beaver" variety. Even so, common sense and experience tells us that people come together to create families of many different kinds.

    The term "values" is even more difficult to sum up. My dictionary says value is "an ethic or moral." Those words, then, are interchangeable, but common usage has given "moral" a religious connotation, as in "the Moral Majority"...which was neither, as the joke goes. I heard a radio host define tolerance as "people of all religions accepting one another regardless of their religious differences," then he added, "and accepting the non-religious because they have rights, too." Initially impressed by his open-mindedness, I was chagrined to hear him quickly say, "of course, we'd prefer a little religion in everyone, for the preservation of family values and all that." This sentiment, so often heard, illustrates how closely linked with religion ethics, morals and "family values" have become.

    The fact that religion has been responsible for a great preponderance of abuse of those very values is rarely mentioned, except by nonbelievers weary of being unfairly blamed for all that goes wrong in the world. Ironically, the Bible is no repository of family values, as anyone who has read it can attest, even though few evidently bother to do so. Jesus may have said "And a man's foes shall be they of his own household," but those aren't the biblical family values you usually hear preachers, politicians and demagogues extolling. Instead, they deflect attention from such negative examples (and there are many) in the misnamed "good book," by pointing to something more consistent with the usual spin that's been put on current religious mythology.

    Archaeologists and anthropologists have uncovered proof that early civilizations produced numerous codes of ethics predating those of modern religions. The Code of Hammurabi, which was discovered in Persia in 1901, predates by hundreds of years the oldest known code at that time, the Book of the Covenant of the Old Testament. Hammurabi ascended the Babylonian throne around 2250 BCE, and, showing a conciliatory attitude to the numerous gods worshipped by his subjects in various states under his control, described himself in the code's prologue as "of the seed royal which Sin begat," referring to the moon-god Sin, the creator-god of that time and region. But it was the Sun-god, Shamash, whose figure was carved into the stone and from whom King Hammurabi said he received the law codes which administered a uniform justice throughout his realm. His proclaimed goal of justice and a noteworthy consideration for the rights of women throughout Hammurabi's Code sets it apart from the later Hebrew codes upon which Judaism and Christianity were founded.

    In 1952 an even older law code was discovered in Mesopatamia. King Ur-Nammu, who lived 300 years before Hammurabi, enacted social reforms to protect orphans, widows and the poor into his code, stressing restitution to the victim as much as punishment for the perpetrator. The remarkable similarities of the Ur-Nammu and Hammarabi codes to the style and legislation incorporated in the much more recent Hebrew code shows without question that the biblical code was appropriated from the earlier ones and was no more inspired by gods than those were. This is indisputable proof that human beings considered ethics and family values of importance long before religionists started telling us how much we lack them. It is self-serving theists who are responsible for the stereotype that family values are practiced only by those of religious belief. How better to discourage a wavering believer than to paint all nonbelievers with the label of immorality?

    As an atheist mother with real family values -- as opposed to the phony variety often paraded for public consumption -- I resent it. Because my ethics came about as a result of my experiences and my evolution into a rational and emotional human being, I take responsibility for my actions seriously, as most atheists do. Unlike religious people, whose morality is founded upon a fear-based system of punishment for doing wrong, and for whom do's and don'ts are doled out by other human beings as the absolute word of an unknowable god, we have to accept responsibility for making the right decisions, and accept the consequences. There is nowhere else to pass the buck. I realized long ago that acting compassionately towards other people and other species, because I choose to do so, is the highest form of ethical behavior; it is doing the right thing solely based on the belief that it is right, as opposed to being good because you are afraid of punishment or hopeful of reward in some mythical hereafter.

    It's common to hear that we would all be running around murdering one another without the carrot-and-stick approach embodied in religion, but there's absolutely no proof for it. In fact, non-religious societies have much lower crime rates than the United States, one of the most overtly religious countries in the world. Over 150 years ago, Charles Darwin recognized that there are, and probably always will be, individuals not fully evolved mentally, morally and socially, but he believed they ought to be handled with scientific knowledge and understanding rather than promises of rewards in the bye-and-bye. He believed that the family, and by extension, community, state, nation and in fact, civilization itself, can survive only if mutual aid and cooperation result in the development of feelings such as sympathy, obligation, and conscience, which arise from our experiences. Those feelings are just as natural, simple, fundamental and original in humans as are hunger and the need for warmth.

    Darwin not only granted the supremacy of conscience, but he accounted for its purely naturalistic origin. How preferable that is to being told that we are helpless to control our dark urges unless we submit to an unseen and unknowable fantasy! Ironically, theists accuse atheists of having no hope, but it is they whose dark view of humanity preaches an inability to live ethically unless we harbor a fear of supernatural intervention.

    Had god-belief and dogma not gotten in the way of giving everyone a real foundation for ethical conduct, our world would be a more peaceful one. No one can convince me that we have evolved to appreciate beautiful art, a gorgeous sunset, or a stirring piece of music, to feel love for a child, a parent, a partner, or a kitten, to use our curiosity and our knowledge to cure disease and to explore our world and beyond, but we are incapable of using human intellect and emotions to govern our actions and relate compassionately to one another. I believe that each of us must take responsibility for showing, through our own behavior, how to be ethical in dealing with one another, not out of fear of punishment or hope of reward, but because it is our only hope for a better life for all of us, and by extension, the Earth, our home, and all its inhabitants.

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